Quarter-life Crisis

I think I’m in the middle of a quarter-life crisis. I’m partial to the term mid-mid-life crisis, but I think the proper terminology is quarter-life crisis.

To help me give adequate background information for this post, here is an excerpt from my autobiography which I began writing in April of 2014:

“My name is River and I’m 24 years old. Since I was in high school, I’ve always had my life planned out. I was going to get married and start a family by the time I was 25. Okay, so it’s not an intricate, exuberant, or even a difficult goal to accomplish, but it’s all I’ve ever wanted out of my life, if I did anything at all. Sure, I had other dreams – I wanted to be a teacher, a singer, a nurse, an author, and even an actress; but none of that mattered to me if it didn’t work out. It was cool to dream about, but all I wanted out of my life was to be a mother and have at least a somewhat normal family, to have someone look up to me and call me mom. My life hasn’t been the easiest and I’ve really started to think deeply about it since I’ll be turning 25 in just three months.”

This is the very first paragraph of my book that’s being released in August of this year, 2015. I’m turning 26 in two weeks and it’s really starting to depress me. I made myself believe that even though I was 25 and still not married that I had a whole year with my devoted boyfriend to get married and start a family together. I like to think I’m a pretty realistic individual so I don’t need a big wedding right now knowing we can’t afford it. Simply getting our marriage licenses and getting all the legal stuff taken care of would be more than enough for me.

What’s standing in my way, you ask? My boyfriend, actually. He says that I have a really unrealistic view of what a relationship should be, that he will never be able to meet my standards, he’s not sure he wants to deal with my ‘stupid and immature bullshit’ the rest of his life, and just isn’t sure it’s going to work out between us so he doesn’t want to commit and get married so it will be difficult for us to split up if that is what our future holds.

His version of my ‘stupid and immature bullshit’ is calling him out when he lies to me. Neither of us is perfect and we haven’t had the easiest relationship together. We’ve both wronged the other but we’ve always pulled through and worked out our differences. We’ve made mistakes. His mistake he likes to make all the time is flirting with other girls via text. He never does it in person when I’m around so I don’t know if he does it behind my back or while he’s at work. I haven’t caught him in that yet.

I saw him deleting text messages from someone right in front of me and he lied about it. Me making a big deal about him lying to me when he believes he has done nothing wrong is his version of my ‘immature and stupid bullshit’. He will never believe he has done anything wrong in these instances because he makes the excuse that he is only joking so it shouldn’t be a big deal. Yet, he knows I hate it and will lie to me rather than tell me the truth when I catch him. Not to mention how pissed of he gets when I used to do that, too.

At least I’m realistic in the fact a couple will fight. You can’t avoid it. Two different people will have differing opinions. Put two people together that are stubborn and as pig-headed as they come, like us, and there is no way we won’t ever fight. He thinks that a relationship shouldn’t be hard – that you shouldn’t have to work at all – and that two people shouldn’t fight as much as we tend to. To me, that is completely unrealistic when he knows how opinionated and stubborn we both are. Even if we should fight less, all relationships require work. Friendships even require work, why would an intimate relationship with a boyfriend or girlfriend require some sort of work?

Either way, his attitude towards me and the fact I’m not going to reach my life goal of being married and starting a family by the age of 25 (or at the age of 25 as I resigned myself to), has made me seriously question whether it’s worth it. Not with life, I don’t mean I’m so depressed I’m thinking of killing myself because I’m not. I just mean with him. I almost feel like I’ve just wasted the (soon-to-be) 4 years with him and it’s never going to go any further.

I know logically what I would tell someone in my situation and I’ve tried to reason with myself; he has proven that he isn’t going to take that final step and commit completely, for the rest of our lives, and that he doesn’t want to. It’s hard because I love him and I know he loves me in his strange and non-conformist way.

Hence the mid-mid-life crisis. Do I push on with him and just hope for the best when it comes to our future? Or do I cut my loses and find someone who wants what I want? I’ve thought about it over and over for the past month or two and I’m as indecisive as ever. I guess I’m hoping my birthday will bring me some clarity. Another year older, another year wiser, right?

(By the way, the picture is not the actual cover to my book, it’s just something I had a friend put together when I was writing it to try and market the thing myself :P)